The Pacific

On the seventh day of my vacation to the great northwest, I thought I'd wander the neighborhoods of Portland before I took my red eye flight back east.  But that morning I decided to drive to the Pacific Ocean and see a WW2 battlefield.

Huh?  Yes, one night in 1942 a Japanese sub surfaced offshore and shelled a U.S. coastal fort at the juncture of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean.  No one was hurt, no damage was done and no fire was returned, but it is the only instance of the mainland United States being attacked by a naval ship of a foreign power since the War of 1812.

I drove out there, and back, along the Columbia River which Lewis and Clark used as a highway to the Pacific even before the War of 1812.  I was staggered by the beauty of the great northwest on this vacation.

Vacation over, I returned home and resumed running at noontime with my coworker L.  On the day this photo was snapped, we ran to the two Occupy sites from last year in DC on the first anniversary of this grassroots effort to wrest control of our country back from the plutocrats.